We know what's been going on among Israel, Iran, and the United States: Mostly, the US has been playing the stooge for Israeli interests who have a bug up their butts about Iran.
With his, "make it about WMD and Americans will get behind a war" line of reasoning, Wolfie taught us to look around and behind the propaganda to discover what the real agenda is. Israel and the US claim Iran must be forced into bankruptcy because it has or wants or secretly tried to get nuclear weapons.
This diary attempts to show that Israel wants oil pipelines and Persian Gulf gambling wealth; is willing to hold a nation of 70 million under threat of terror and economic destabilization in order to acquire those goals, and is not concerned that US interests may be jeopardized in the process of achieving their goals.
Follow the money flowing through the oil pipelines, not American pipelines, Israeli pipelines.
John Dizard's May, 2004, Salon Magazine article, How Ahmed Chalabi conned the neocons exposes how Doug Feith and his Jerusalem law partner, Marc Zell, schemed with Chalabi:
"He said he would end Iraq's boycott of trade with Israel, and would allow Israeli companies to do business there. He said [the new Iraqi government] would agree to rebuild the pipeline from Mosul [in the northern Iraqi oil fields] to Haifa [the Israeli port, and the location of a major refinery]."
More recent coverage of Chalabi's doings indicate that not only did he snooker the neocons with dreams of oil pipeline wealth, he got Iran's number one enemy removed from power in the bargain, without spending a single rial of Iranian treasure. Chalabi knew exactly what piece of kosher meat to dangle in front of Israel's eyes; hound dog Doug Feith snapped at it eagerly.
In narratives of the US's first successful (and mostly peaceful, friendly, and mutually beneficial) oil pipeline deals in the Middle East, Aramco's TAPLINE, the biggest headaches US oil companies had to confront came from America's friends, Great Britain and Israel, not her enemies. In fact, America had no enemies in the Middle East in the late 'forties and early 'fifties, and, according to a Summer 1990 article by Douglas Little in Harvard Business School's Business History Review 64.n2, until Truman endorsed the creation of a state for the Jews in Palestine, contravening FDR's promise to Arab leaders, the Arab states were nearly unconditionally friendly with the US. Because of British intransigence and Zionist agitation, TAPLINE was constructed from Dhahran, on Saudi Arabia's Persian Gulf shore, to Sidon, in Lebanon, rather than to Haifa in Palestine.
It's insightful to note that Saudi rulers were persuaded to make their oil concessions to Aramco when revenues from tourism to Arabia's Islamic holy places fell off precipitously. Tourism is still a major source of revenue for Middle Eastern states.
The sight of all that oil flowing across the Mediterranean, from Sidon, just miles beyond Israel's border, and all that wealth flowing to Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, and the US, presumably motivated Israel to redress this situation; Israel and Iran formed Trans Asiatic Oil Limited, designed to ship oil from Iran's Persian Gulf ports to Eilat, and to feed the oil through pipelines financed by Baron Rothschild to Haifa, whence Israel would take a portion for domestic use and sell the rest to Western Europe, in competition with TAPLINE, which United States companies had created, financed, and constructed primarily to supply Western Europe's fuel needs during the long period of post-war reconstruction, and to alleviate a strain on American domestic energy needs during the US's booming post-war period. According to Yossi Melman, writing in Haaretz, Trans Asiatic Oil functioned in an extremely lucrative fashion for Israel, for as long as the Shah of Iran and his Mossad-trained SAVAK ruled the people of Iran, or, in Melman's more detailed words:
From the time that Iran de facto recognized Israel in 1951, increasingly close relations developed between the two countries, until the 1970s when they reached a point of strategic partnership. This partnership had four main components:
{1}Iranian assistance for the immigration operations for Jews from Iraq;
{2}Israeli-Iranian cooperation in the area of intelligence (the Mossad, the Shin Bet security services and the Israel Defense Forces helped to establish, train and operate the Iranian army and the units of Sawak - the Iranian security service. In exchange, Israel's intelligence organizations received Iranian assistance in gathering information and operating agents in Iraq to assist the Kurdish revolt);
{3} agreements for military cooperation; and
{4} the supply of Iranian oil to Israel.
Israeli interests prevailed over American interests again; this time Israel leveraged American legislators against America's best interest while exempting Israel from negative impacts on its economic interests. In the period 1993-1996, AIPAC and individuals including Edgar Bronfman, Sr., exerted pressure on the Clinton Administration and later the US legislature to first, sign executive orders that derailed US oil developer Conoco's winning bid to develop Iranian oil fields. The prohibitions against oil development reified by Clinton's executive orders were expanded to cover nearly all forms of commerce with Iran, and endowed those prohibitions with the full protection of US law in the Iran-Libya Sanctions Act in 1996. According to key personnel, that law was all but dictated verbatim by AIPAC.
The larger irony, as Walt and Mearsheimer call it in The Israel Lobby, is that:
...although Israel lay behind the American decision to cut economic ties to Iran, Israel did not pass any laws barring Israeli-Iranian trade and Israelis continued to purchase Iranian goods {and, one would reasonably presume, sell goods to Iran} through third parties. p. 288 (emphasis added)
Follow the markers on the gaming tables, not only in American gambling casinos but on Iran's Kish Island: Sheldon Adelson wants a piece of Iran's gambling action. Fights over gambling in Cuba ended up with that nation enduring pariah status for 50 years. Sheldon Adelson is the third richest man in the US. It's been said that so lucrative are Adelson's casinos that when he goes to bed at night he wakes up a million dollars richer the next morning. Iran is developing Kish Island as a playground, and money sponge, for fat-cat emirate citizens. Iran is even contemplating doing away with the requirement that women who travel to Kish Island wear scarves--somehow, requirement of the Constitution of the Islamic Republic of Iran would not extend to tourists on Kish Island.
On Feb. 7, 2008, Blogger Bernard Avishai wrote this about Adelson's zealous Zionism:
You look at what he’s funded, after all, and you sense primordial images of what the Jewish state means: $25 million to Yad Vashem, the holocaust memorial, unspecified millions to AIPAC, $30 million to Birthright, which brings Jewish teens to Israel for free. Adelson has also funded what he takes to be pro-Israeli (and pro-mogul) politicians like George W. Bush.
I’ve never hit him up for money, but if I did, I bet that telling him that Israel lives in a tough neighborhood, that it needs to be strong and hit back hard and early—that there are new Hitlers all over the Muslim world, and new Chamberlains all over the West—would be, well, table stakes. No surprise, really, that Adelson’s second biggest beneficiary in Jerusalem, after Yad Vashem, has been the Shalem Center, a rightist think-tank in a paradise of a building a block from my home. Former chief-of-staff Boogi Yaalon and Natan Sharansky are senior fellows. Both think Jerusalem is for world Jews, the peace process is for appeasers, and Israelis who condemn settlements are needlessly washing dirty linen in public. They are getting $4.5 million in chump change to pursue "strategic studies." This means writing (or hiring ghost writers to write) articles and staging conferences to warn the West about Iran, advance the global war on terror, and so forth.
It could just be that William Kristol's come in from the rain job with the Grey Lady was third prize.
Avishai continues in his blog, commenting on Adelson's dreams of owning an Israeli sports team and to Adelson's tactic of buying an otherwise unprofitable newspaper, copies of whic he gives away, in order to promote the Adelson/Netanyahu/Zionist brand. (Note to Richard Mellon Scaife and Sun Myung Moon: Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery.) Avishai's thoughts are interesting as far as they go, but I wonder if Adelson's bought-and-paid-for propaganda attacks on Iran are about more than just a way for Sheldon to express his Zionism. I wonder if he has his eye on Iran's Kish Island Persian Gulf playground.